Say a Prayer for the Octopus

Friday, October 17, 2014

French
director Abel Gance was perhaps the first European filmmaker to create movies
on the epic scale achieved by D. W. Griffith in films like The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). The
Americans had the advantage over their European counterparts in that their
country had not been devastated by the First World War, which had consumed
Europe just as epic cinema was coming into existence. It is perhaps not surprising then that the
first European film to employ this similarly epic approach, Gance’s J’accuse (1919), took WWI as its theme. J’accuse
tells two stories, really: the first, a melodramatic love triangle involving
two men and their love for the same woman; the second, a harrowing and
remarkably realistic depiction of the experiences of those two men fighting on
the Western front. J’accuse pioneered the use of location shooting: much of its war
scenes were filmed directly on the recently vacated battlefields of WWI and, in
some cases, while the war was still in
progress, thusly blurring the line between fiction and documentary.

Now,
there are several aspects of this film that I’d like to touch on. First, J’accuse
grapples with an issue that would confront David Lean decades later during the
production of Dr. Zhivago: how does
one depict a poet on the screen? How do we “show” poetry? Is it enough to just
have the poet read his or her poetry, or is there some aspect of filmic
language that can present a poetic worldview?
The hero of J’accuse, the virtuous
Jean Diaz, is a poet, and Gance’s treatment of his poetry is quite
beautiful. Near the beginning of the
film, Jean recites a poem called “Ode to the Sun,” and rather than presenting
the words in the intertitles, Gance presents us with a series of beautiful
images of the sun, reflecting in calm oceanic water, rippling across a rushing
stream, and warming a grassy field. Jean’s
words are thusly alchemically transmuted into pure imagery.

Later
in the film, when Jean’s soul has been destroyed by war, he returns to his “Ode
to the Sun” and rereads it, and this time Gance accompanies the tranquil images
of happier times with the actual words of the poem onscreen. And it serves as a devastating contrast to
the realities that Jean has confronted in battle; as far as Jean is concerned
now, the words of the poem, and the beautiful images that they create, are
lies. As one of the intertitles tells
us, the “soldier in him destroyed the poet.”

Shifting
our focus a bit here, I want to discuss the climax of the film, which is as
memorable as anything you’ll ever see in cinema. A deranged Jean, having returned to his
hometown in Provence, becomes obsessed with the idea that the survivors must
render an account of their conduct to the war dead. This is part of where the title, J’accuse—“I accuse”—comes into
play. Jean accuses the survivors, be
they civilians or fellow soldiers. In
fact, he accuses all of France, and the entire world order, for the irrevocable
slaughter that has been perpetrated.
Now, the phrase “j’accuse” would have deep associations in France; it is
the title of the polemic with which Emile Zola reopened the Dreyfus Affair
which tore apart French society in the late 1890’s and early 1900’s. J’accuse is the refrain of the just, venting
their spleen on all the corruption and malignity hidden beneath the façade of
polite society.

So
Jean levels his “j’accuse” at the survivors and summons up the dead as his
witnesses. And, casting all pretense of
realism aside, the dead awaken. We see a field of wooden crosses scattered
across a battlefield fade from view, supplanted by the bodies they rest upon. And the bodies rise up, a veritable army of
the dead, and flood into town to confront the living. One is reminded of the climactic scene in
Koji Wakamatsu’s United Red Army,
where the militants, faced with surrender or fighting to the death, consider
the latter option because they have to somehow justify themselves to their
comrades whom they’ve murdered or driven to suicide. Europe found itself facing the same conundrum
after WWI. How could they justify
themselves to the millions of young men they’d sacrificed to Moloch? I don’t have an answer, and I don’t think
Gance really did either as, in his film, the dead are quickly contented by the
sight of their loved ones and return to their graves, while the living are left
to ponder whether what has just passed is a dream or a hallucination.

This
image of the war dead as a surging crowd is best conjured up by T. S. Eliot in
one of the most memorable passages of The
Waste Land: “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over
London bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.” In the
event of a zombie apocalypse, perhaps the risk is not that they’ll eat out
brains; perhaps the real risk is that they’ll judge us.

Sunday, October 5, 2014

The
vast majority of uprisings throughout history have gone down to ignominious
defeat. From the revolt of Oshio
Heihachiro against the Tokugawa regime in 1837 to the Japanese student protests
of the late 1960’s, this has been true of modern Japanese history (I say “the
vast majority,” not “all,” mind you; the Meiji revolt was certainly successful).
But in many cases it’s the gesture of
revolt that counts more than its efficacy.
This is the argument advanced in Ivan Morris’s book The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan. He wrote it in the wake of his friend Yukio
Mishima’s quixotic “coup attempt” and subsequent ritual suicide in 1970. This same year saw the release of Masahiro
Shinoda’s carnivalesque study of the futility of revolution, The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan.

Masahiro
Shinoda rose to fame with the Japanese New Wave in the early 1960’s and his
prolific and varied output included noir, domestic dramas, rebellious youth
movies, and period pieces (jidaegeki),
including Assassination (1964) and Samurai Spy (1965), which have to be
some of the most convoluted samurai movies ever made. But by the time 1970 rolled around, the
Japanese movie landscape was beginning to change dramatically, with the old
studios going bankrupt (Daiei) or shifting to increasingly pornographic fare (Nikkatsu). A lot of the other Japanese New Wavers were
either turning to documentary (like Oshima and Imamura) or drifting out of the
industry (like poor Seijun Suzuki, who was fired by Nikkatsu in 1967 and
subsequently blacklisted for the next ten years). Shinoda was one of the few filmmakers of his
generation to keep up a more or less uninterrupted output of increasingly
strange films through the 1970’s, which saw him eventually turning to an
exploration of folk and mythological subjects in bizarre films like Himiko (1974) and Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees (1975).

So
The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan
comes at what is in many respects a transitional period for Shinoda; the same
can be said of Japanese cinema and Japanese society, where the radical left was
more or less defeated and a capitalist consensus settled into place. Buraikan
reflects many of these tensions and transformations. The film is set in decadent late-Edo Japan,
where Mizuno, a high-ranking administrator with a moralistic streak, has set
out to reform society through a series of puritanical laws banning: prostitution,
fireworks, most forms of theater, flamboyant dress, etc. The various entertainers and denizens of the
pleasure quarters find themselves out of a job and, as one of them puts it, “What’s
the point of being alive if we can’t do what we want?” A revolutionary
atmosphere begins to obtain in Edo (as Tokyo was called at them time) and it
draws together a ragtag group of unlikely insurgents (as tends to be the case
under these circumstances): Naojiro (Tatsuya Nakadai), a would-be actor with a
meddlesome mother who keeps coming between him and the prostitute he loves;
Kaneko, an assassin/psychopathic killing machine who wishes to murder all those
in power; Ushimatsu, a poor painter whose wife has killed herself and whose son
has been sold to an itinerant acting troop; and Kochiyama, a high-ranking
government official who wishes to harness the power of the discontented masses
to unseat Mizuno and restore theaters and prostitution to the people of Japan.

Of
these diverse figures, Naijiro seems the most emblematic of the hedonistic
spirit of the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters.
Largely apolitical, he joins the conspiracies of the revolutionaries for
fun and because it gives him a larger stage than he can secure for himself in the
theatrical world (where there seems to be no place for him; he’s not a
professional actor, he’s a dilettante). In
his domestic life, his sole concern is his own pleasure, and so he abuses his
mother when she harasses him about his conduct.
When his frustration with her reaches the breaking point, he literally
picks her up and hurls her off a cliff into the Sumida river (she gets rescued
and comes back to bicker with him some more).
As the movie reaches its climax, Naijiro has left his revolutionary
friends to spend time with his prostitute lover and as the insurgents are
slaughtered, he picks up his mother to throw her off a cliff again. Because these things are cyclical, and the
rising up and rising down (as William T. Vollmann would phrase it) of popular
violence is just as inevitable as the changing of the seasons or Naijiro
attempting to kill his mother. In the
background, the local coffin-maker continues to hammer away at a product always
in demand.

Post-script:
As far as I can tell, nobody in this movie is named Buraikan. So I have no idea where the title comes from
or what it’s supposed to mean.

Monday, September 29, 2014

As
a person who enjoys classifying people and things, I am always happy to place
filmmakers within specific categories and movements. In the Japanese context, there are the Golden
Age directors (stretching from the thirties through the late fifties/early
sixties): these are filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji
Mizoguchi. Then there are the members of
the Japanese New Wave (the Nuberu Bagu) of the early sixties: Nagisa Oshima,
Shohei Imamura, Yoshishige Yoshida. But
there are certain filmmakers who fall somewhere in between these neat
categorizations: filmmakers like Masaki Kobayashi and the subject of today’s
post, Kon Ichikawa. Too late on the
scene to belong fully to the Golden Age (in my more or less arbitrary
definition, a Golden Ager has to have begun making films before or at least
during WWII) but maintaining too much of the technique and the aesthetic of the
Golden Age to qualify as New Wave, Ichikawa and the filmmakers of his
generation occupy a transitional period in Japanese cinema.

Ichikawa,
like many Japanese filmmakers, is unfortunately only spottily represented on
DVD in the United States. Criterion has
released two of his WWII films, The
Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain
(more on these presently), Tokyo Olympiad,
a well-regarded documentary about the 1964 Tokyo Olympics which now appears to
be out of print, and The Makioka Sisters,
an adaptation of the Tanizaki novel of the same name. Criterion has also made available on Hulu Odd Obsession—another Tanizaki
adaptation, this time of his late novel The
Key, which hints at the more explicit sexual concerns of the New Wave—It Isn’t Easy Being Two, a film about
early childhood, and Princess from the
Moon, which, as far as I can tell, narrates a Close Encounters-style version of the classic Japanese tale of “The
Bamboo Cutter’s Daughter.” I haven’t seen these last two because they don’t
appeal to me, I haven’t seen The Makioka
Sisters because I want to read the novel first, and I haven’t seen Tokyo Olympiad because I can’t find it. This means that my entire experience of
Ichikawa’s cinema is confined to The
Burmese Harp, Odd Obsession, and Fires on the Plain.

In
his prime—the late fifties and early sixties—Ichikawa’s films were all scripted
by his wife, Natto Wada, who became disillusioned with Japanese cinema in 1965
and retired, allegedly triggering a marked decline in the quality of Ichikawa’s
films. However, in 1956, when The Burmese Harp was released, the
Ichikawa-Wada partnership was still going strong and the result is one of the most
enigmatic war movies you’re ever likely to see.
Set in Burma at the end of WWII, the film depicts a close-knit Japanese
army unit as they surrender to British forces.
The unit’s captain is a musician and he’s turned his force into a choir
and they frequently raise morale by joining together in song, all to the
accompaniment of the titular Burmese harp, played by a soldier named Mizushima. For reference purposes, a Burmese harp looks
like this:

Upon
discovering that Japan has surrendered, Mizushima’s unit promptly surrenders as
well. However, there is another Japanese
army unit nearby holed up in the mountains and intent on fighting to the
death. The British send Mizushima, armed
only with his harp, to try to negotiate the surrender of the hold-outs, while
the rest of his unit is sent down south to an internment camp. Now, one of the striking things about this
movie is how little we really know about our Japanese protagonists. We have no idea what their experience of the
war has been like prior to the opening of the film. How long have they been in Burma? Have they been in other theaters? What
horrible things have they seen? What
horrible things have the y done? This all remains a mystery. But what happens next to Mizushima, regardless
of whatever came before, is a psychic catastrophe. Because Mizushima fails to convince the
Japanese hold-outs to surrender, and they are promptly massacred by the British,
their bodies left to rot. Mizushima,
injured but alive, is discovered by a Burmese monk, who nurses him back to
health; Mizushima repays him by stealing his robes. He shaves his head and wanders the land as a
mendicant monk. His initial intention is
just to head south to rejoin his unit in captivity, but as he travels, he is
repeatedly confronted by the unburied, decomposing bodies of Japanese soldiers,
and they exert a strange spell on him, and he finds himself unable to rejoin
his comrades.

Now,
the exact nature of Mizushima’s problem is left unclear for most of the movie. But he seems to have been cast in the role of
an everyman confronted with the violence of historical forces beyond his
control. And, one drop of water in a sea
of human suffering though he may be, he takes it upon himself to try to restore
peace to the world, or at least to the little patch of Burma where he finds
himself. One is reminded of the naïve/idiot
character played by Jim Caviezel in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line who, in an unlikely poetic outburst, asks, “What
is this war within nature? Why must the land contend with the sea? [etc., etc.,
typical Malick pseudo-philosphy.]” But Mizushima is asking the same questions
and Ichikawa’s film is similar to Malick’s in that it places its human drama
within a broader landscape of great natural beauty (although they’re both
tropical, Burma possesses an austerity lacking in the unimpeded fecundity of
Guadalcanal).

The Burmese Harp
climaxes with Mizushima asking why such suffering has to exist in the world and
concluding that it is not for humans to know the answers to such questions, but
merely to do their best to alleviate that suffering. And this is where they lose me. Because the suffering experienced by millions
upon millions of people in the Second World War was not inexplicable; it was
the product of concrete, readily understandable historical processes; first and
foremost—in the Asia-Pacific theater—the rise of Japanese militarism and
imperialism. To ascribe the war to unknowable
mystical forces is a cop-out and it undermines the deeply felt humaneness that
animates much of Ichikawa’s film. There is
great compassion and even optimism on display here, in marked contrast to Fires on the Plain (1959), an
unrelenting nightmare about the few survivors of a Japanese army unit trying
hopelessly to evacuate from a Filipino island while being picked off by unseen
American forces and ravaged by starvation.
In The Burmese Harp, Mizushima’s
comrades want to survive the war in part so that they can return home and
rebuild Japan. In Fires on the Plain, nobody is thinking that far ahead. There will be no recourse to mysticism in
this film, nor will there we be any trace of hope. Perhaps, if one were to sit down to watch the
two movies, it would be good to watch The
Burmese Harp last, so that one might retain greater hope for humanity.

Monday, September 22, 2014

Amongst
the titans of Japanese cinema’s Golden Age, Keisuke Kinoshita is probably one
of the least recognized in the United States.
Now, Japanese directors of this period were nothing if not prolific, and
Kinoshita, who made scores of movies, is no exception. He is the most represented director in the
Criterion Collection on Hulu, where dozens of his movies, from the 1940’s
through the ‘80’s, have been made available.
Whenever I don’t know what to watch—which happens sometimes, as I’m not terribly
keen on making decisions—I can always fall back on Kinoshita. Over the years, he worked in virtually every
genre except the pink film: costume drama (The
Ballad of Narayama), ghost story (Yotsuya
Kaidan), interpersonal drama (Thus
Another Day), comedy (Carmen Comes
Home, which is also the first color film in Japanese cinema). Now, Kinoshita—in my experience, anyway, and
there are still plenty of his movies that I haven’t seen—never rises to the
heights of contemporaries like Ozu or Kurosawa (although he comes close with The Ballad of Narayama (1958)), but his
films demonstrate a consistent quality and sensitivity to the things that make
us human that certainly makes them worth seeing.

This
evening I watched one of his earlier films, Here’s
to the Young Lady (1949). I was
attracted to it because it stars Setsuko Hara, Ozu’s leading lady, and Iwas also pleasantly surprised to find
that the screenplay was written by Kaneto Shindo, who would go on to become a
major filmmaker in his own right, best known in the U.S for horror/period
pieces like Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968). Here’s
to the Young Lady finds Shindo working in a very different mode: it is a
comedy-drama (or perhaps drama with strong comedic overtones?) set in Japan
under American occupation. Yasuko Ikeda (Setsuko
Hara), a well-educated young woman from an upper-class family fallen on hard
times, is forced by economic necessity to pursue a marriage with Ishizu, a
kind-hearted auto-repair shop owner with a lot of money. Their relationship is interesting in the way
it shows how social class and economic status don’t always align: Yasuko’s
family is upper-class but impoverished, whereas Ishizu is lower-class (and
apparently grew up in poverty) but, if not rich, at least certainly comfortably
off.

Yasuko’s family, we hear, spent the war in China—we’re never told any details
of their activity there—and has been undergoing staggered repatriation to Japan
over the past few years.Now, prior to
Japan’s downfall, when they were doing well for themselves in China, they
probably wouldn’t have had anything to do with Ishizu on a social level.The extent of their connection with him would
have been limited to getting their car fixed.It would have been delusional for him to even think that he had a chance
with their daughter.The marriage they
seek to arrange between Yasuko and Ishizu stems from economic forces beyond their
control.And everyone, including the two
would-be lovers, is well aware of this, but etiquette constrains them from acknowledging
it.And so their interactions are
predicated on pretending that this issue doesn’t exist, until things come to a
head and it becomes unavoidable.

It’s
a very affecting film. The Ikedas have
been forced to sell their piano, so Ishizu buys them a new one for Yasuko’s
birthday. And when she plays a piece, he
inquires of one of her relatives, “Is that Beethoven?” Because that’s the only Western
classical composer he can name. When he’s
told, “No, it’s Chopin: Fantaisie
Impromptu,” he goes out and buys the record, determined to like it and “appreciate”
it. In another noteworthy scene, Yasuko
and Ishizu go to a ballet performance and Ishizu finds himself moved to tears
for reasons he can’t articulate. In
another post from not too long ago, I quote Akira Kurosawa’s famous assessment
of Mikio Naruse, whose work he described as being “like a great river with a
calm surface and a raging current in its depths.” Such a description could just
as well be attached to Ishizu as he pursues his unlikely romance with Yasuko.

Monday, September 15, 2014

In
the 1950’s, during the so-called Hundred Flowers movement, in which
intellectuals were encouraged by the Chinese government to air their grievances
against the regime, and were subsequently persecuted when they did so, a young
dissident named Lin Zhao was incarcerated for her convictions. While in prison, she did not have access to
paper, so she wrote her essays and poems—and she had much to say—on the cell
walls. As she did not have pen or
pencil, she wrote thousands of words in
her own blood. She is the subject of
Hu Jie’s moving documentary film, Searching
for Lin Zhao’s Soul (2004), which is distributed in the U.S. by dGenerate
Films.

Some
of the best documentaries I’ve seen in recent years have been brought out here
by dGenerate Films. Their subject is
Chinese independent cinema and their catalogue encompasses both documentary and
feature films. What is especially
striking about their documentaries is the amount of overt dissent that they
show taking place in China. Whether
protesting against the illegal confiscation of their homes by the government
and shady property developers in Ou Ning’s Meishi
Street (2006) or preventable disasters in Xu Xin’s Karamay (2010), there is a remarkably amount of overt dissident
activity taking place in China. And this
contradicts the narratives being advanced by both the Chinese government—which is
terrified of its own people and seeks to present the façade of a harmonious,
economically vibrant society—and the Western media, which tends to focus on a
few causes célèbres like Chen
Guangcheng and Ai Weiwei, to the exclusion of much broader social movements.

Let’s
take the case of Meishi Street. Filmed in the streets of Beijing in 2005, the
movie depicts the efforts of residents of the titular Meishi neighborhood to
prevent their homes from being eminent domained to make way for the 2008
Olympics. In protest at the injustice to
which they’ve been subjected, the residents regularly put up slogans and
protest signs on their property, decrying the corruption of the government and
the real estate companies. When the
police show up and take down the signs, the protestors just put up new ones. The main subject of the film, a restaurateur named
Zhang Jinli, resorts to painting the slogans directly onto the walls of his
property. The courage on display here is
remarkable and is something that I fear that most people would not associate
with modern China. And this isn’t to
trivialize the real sacrifices made by people like Chen Guangcheng, or the Nobel
Laureate Liu Xiaobo; rather, it is my desire to call attention to the broad
spectrum of dissident activities taking place in China.

Xu Xin's Karamay (2010).

And
now a word about Karamay, undoubtedly
one of the saddest films I’ve ever seen.In 1994, in the Xinjiang town of Karamay, schoolchildren were gathered
at the town hall to perform for high-ranking local and regional party
officials. When a fire broke out, the children
were told to remain seated while the party cadres evacuated.Then they were left to fend for themselves.325 people died, 288 of them children.Their families felt that they never received
proper restitution from the government, and they’ve been protesting at various
levels ever since.The film is
remarkably austere in its conception: it consists largely of interviews in
which the children’s parents sit facing the camera and talk at length about
their experiences.There is very little that
could be considered overtly cinematic about the presentation.And yet the depth of their sorrow, as it
accumulates from one interview to the next, is transfixing and ultimately
heartbreaking.One gets the impression
that these are people who are tired of not being listened to, and so the
opportunity to speak freely and at length is something they relish.And do they ever speak freely!The parents name names of government officials
whom they hold responsible for the disaster and they make it quite clear that they don’t care about the repercussions
that could come from speaking so boldly, because they’ve already lost their
children, and they therefore have nothing else to fear.

So I would strongly
advise you to catch a dGenerate film if you have the opportunity. A number of them are available on Fandor, as
well as on Netflix and Amazon.

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

The
relationship between Japan and China has been so thoroughly blighted by
animosity and distrust over the past, say, one hundred twenty years, that it is
easy to overlook the rich cultural exchange that has obtained between the two
countries for many centuries. There is
perhaps no figure who better embodies this conflicted relationship than that of
Wu Qingyuan, aka Go Seigen, who is depicted in Tian Zhuangzhuang’s 2006 film The Go Master.First
off, a word about go for those not in
the know. Go is played on a 19x19
grid. Two players, one armed with black
markers, one with white, place their markers on the points of intersection; the
objective is to surround the other player’s pieces, which permits one to remove
them from the board. The player with the
most pieces on the board at the end of the game is the winner. I did not become aware of this until I read
Yasunari Kawabata’s novel The Master of
Go (which, despite the similar title, is not connected to Tian’s film,
although it does include several fleeting references to Wu).

The Go Master
presents us with the life of Wu Qingyuan, one of the greatest go players of the
twentieth century (some would say the
greatest, although I’m not in a position to judge that evalutation). He was a child prodigy in his native China
and in 1928, at the age of fourteen, he immigrated to Japan, then the center of
the go world. Here he resided for the
rest of his life, including the bloody Second Sino-Japanese War that carried on
into WWII, pitting his country of birth against his adopted homeland. These divided loyalties, between countries
and between the art of go and the exigencies of politics, are at the heart of
Tian’s film and they play out with great restraint and ambiguity. The role of Wu is played by Taiwanese actor
Chang Chen, who presents a picture of dignity and aesthetic refinement but
provides few points of entry into Wu’s character. Tian’s portrait of Wu is deliberately opaque;
we see everything in his life at a remove, filtered through go and through
grander historical narratives. In the
end, one if left distinctly dissatisfied, as Wu’s motivations remain persistently
elusive and the great questions of his life unanswered. As he begins to suffer something of an
emotional breakdown, and is drawn into religious fanaticism, one finds oneself
at a loss to understand his actions.
They appear arbitrary and little of what came before in the film can be
said to have anticipated them, let alone explained them.

Chang Chen as Wu Qingyuan.

As
something of a side note, I would like to mention that this film contains
something that I’ve very rarely seen in cinema (and surprisingly so, now that I
think about it): a depiction of the explosion of the atomic bomb that was
dropped on Hiroshima.On August 6th,
1945, go masters Kaoru Iwamoto and Utaro Hashimoto were playing a game in a
house on the outskirts of Hiroshima.Midway through the game, as depicted in unflinching detail by Tian, a
blinding light flashed through the house, followed shortly thereafter by the
force of the blast itself.The house was
damaged and those present injured but, dedicated as they were to their art,
they resumed the game and finished it that afternoon.Hashimoto was the victor.

Wu
Qingyuan, better known as Go Seigen, is still alive in Japan. He is one hundred years old.

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Let
me start this off by saying that I hold Aleksandr Sokurov in very high esteem. I think he is one of the greatest living filmmakers
and I am especially fond of his so-called “power tetrology,” consisting of Moloch, Tauris, The Sun, and Faust.
Or rather, I’m fond of three of them, as I have unfortunately not been
able to see Tauris, as it is not
available on Region 1 DVD. Alas. Anyway, with the exception of Faust, these films tell the stories of
some of the twentieth century’s most notorious world leaders: Adolf Hitler in Moloch, Vladimir Lenin in Tauris, and Emperor Hirohito in The Sun.
They are very beautiful films, rich with detail and shot in the uncanny,
vaguely flattened style which distinguishes so much of Sokurov’s oeuvre. But there are certain interpretations of
history in Moloch and The Sun that run counter to a lot of
modern historical thinking and which raise vexing moral problems and I would
like to discuss them each in turn.

First,
let us examine Moloch (1999). Set at Hitler’s Berchtesgaden retreat in
Bavaria, the film follows a few days in the lives of Hitler and his entourage
in 1943. Sokurov’s approach to his
subject is resolutely non-moralizing; much as in 2004’s Downfall (directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel), Sokurov refuses to
depict Hitler as a monster. And I think
that’s just fine. If Hitler is a monster,
then it becomes easy to explain away his actions as the sort of things that a
monster would do. His actions become far
more problematic when we view them as those of a human being like
ourselves. Hitler doesn’t become any
less evil if we see him doing mundane things, like dining and chatting with his
girlfriend, which is where Sokurov places his focus. So, all is well and good until we get to an
exchange about midway through the movie, when one of Hitler’s underlings (I
think it was Goebbels, but I don’t recall exactly) jokingly threatens to send
another one (Bormann?) to Auschwitz, and Hitler says, “What’s Auschwitz?” And then
the underlings become uncomfortable and brush off the question and change the
subject.

Now,
what Sokurov has presented here is revisionist history at its most
pernicious. There has been a movement
afoot for some time now which asserts that Hitler didn’t know about the death
camps, and that this was something that lower-ranking Nazis—Himmler and
Eichmann, etc.—organized without ever bringing Hitler into the fold. The notion that Adolf Hitler—the architect
and instigator of the Nazi party’s vicious anti-Semitism and its accompanying
policies—didn’t know about the existence of Auschwitz is patently absurd, and
it also serves to exculpate Hitler in a way that no amount of cinematic
humanization could do. I can’t imagine
how or why Sokurov latched onto this piece of revisionism, but his casual
insertion of it into Moloch is deeply
morally reprehensible and mars an otherwise excellent film.

Sokurov’s
treatment of Hirohito in The Sun
(2005) is just as vexing. Set in the
final days of WWII and the first days of the American occupation of Japan, The Sun adheres to the widely accepted
narrative in which Hirohito was largely a passive figurehead who had little
direct involvement in the running of Japan’s imperial wars and who, when he
finally stepped up, only did so to bring the war to its conclusion. This version of events was convenient to the
authorities of the American occupation, who found the cooperation of Japan’s
much-revered emperor to be invaluable. However, over the decades and especially since
Hirohito’s death in 1989, there has been a tendency to re-examine his role in
the conduct of the wars, and scholars have increasingly been coming to the
conclusion that the emperor was deeply involved, from the invasion of Manchuria
in 1931 to the surrender in 1945. Under
the Japanese constitution, Hirohito was the sovereign ruler of the country and
the supreme commander of the Japanese military.
He was in close consultation with the military and political authorities
throughout the war and gave personal authorization for numerous atrocities committed
by the Japanese army, including the use of poison gas in China.

Now, as I’ve said, the Americans were interested in suppressing the extent of
Hirohito’s power during the war and the Japanese establishment, for obvious
reasons, shared in this interest. So
there are plenty of people who would see Sokurov’s depiction of Hirohito in The Sun as uncontroversial. That said, it’s not like this information
about Hirohito’s crimes is hidden away somewhere. This is public knowledge and it’s been part
of a public debate, both in international academic circles and in Japan itself. One is forced to come to the conclusion that,
beautifully elegiac though The Sun may
be, it is largely a work of fantasy. And
when you’re dealing with events that impacted so many people so catastrophically,
and the ramifications of which can still be felt today, I think such falsification of the facts is morally unacceptable,
in the same way as Hitler’s purported ignorance of the existence of Auschwitz
is unacceptable. From a man of Sokurov’s
evident compassion and intelligence, I would have expected better.